Monday, March 19, 2012

Building a subway will avoid future regrets

TORONTO - Over 60 years ago, a streetcar line was planned for Queen St. between Strachan and Logan Avenues, with a tunnel running between McCaul and Church Streets.

The concept was much like the proposed Eglinton Crosstown line today.

While the Queen “streetcar subway” was eventually abandoned, we can now only look back and think: If only it had been built, and built much longer, with most of it underground!

If only Toronto hadn’t been so timid when Controller Horatio Hocken proposed the Yonge St. line in 1911, we wouldn’t have had to wait until 1954 for Toronto’s first subway.

In the 1940s, the City had the foresight and boldness to plan for the post-war future.

Today, we’ve become overly deferential to professional advice, while losing confidence in our own lived experience.

Today, we’ve cast aside our common sense.

We’ve become mesmerized by projections that contradict our own instincts.

In 1954, anyone predicting Scarborough and North York would be as built up as they are today, would have been dismissed as delusional.

The same applies for Markham, Richmond Hill and Vaughan.

Yet today, 60 years later, we can’t seem to accept that 50 to 100 years from now, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) will need an integrated network of subways and GO trains, complemented by a vast feeder network of buses.

To avoid more “if only” scenarios, we should embark on subway building now, by extending the Sheppard subway from Don Mills Rd.

to the Scarborough City Centre. Let’s finish what was started.

We should not be connecting the existing Sheppard “stumpway” to a surface Light Rail Train (LRT) system.

We know the fewer the transfers from one mode of transit to another, the more likely we will capture additional riders.

We know, too, that unless mass public transit is removed from existing roadways (by putting it underground, elevating it, or putting it in a corridor parallel to a roadway), it will not be as rapid, reliable or frequent as it can be.

It will therefore be incapable of luring motorists out of their cars.

Last year, Mayor Rob Ford resurrected a dormant TTC subsidiary to see whether the innovation and investment of the private sector could be harnessed to complete the Sheppard subway.